The Morning Download: Making the ‘C’ in CIO Stand for Culture

CIOs are positioned to help their organization navigate labyrinth of cultural change. Pictured: A scene from the main stage at the Gartner Symposium/ITxpo in Orlando, Fla., Oct. 15, 2018.
Photo:
Thomas Loftus / The Wall Street Journal

Good day, CIOs. Among the tools and practices cited by chief information officers as essential to driving future business performance, the behavioral norms and unwritten rules that help shape an organization may be the most noted and the least understood. Cultivating a culture that enables change is the biggest barrier to digital transformation, according to Gartner Inc. At the same time, many, if not most, organizations have little idea of their current culture, and what it needs to be to compete in the near future. CIOs are best positioned to address the challenge.

Meet the new culture chief. Leaders may not need to place much stock in communicating desired culture by what they say or how they behave. Actions, speak louder than words, yes, but in digital transformation-land there is something bigger than actions: Process. And that is where IT leadership comes in play. “Consider a cultural priority at your organization,” Jessica Knight, director, team manager at Gartner, recently told a roomful of attendees at the Gartner Symposium/ITxpo in Orlando, Fla. “Now answer the question, ‘Do the processes and systems that I own support and encourage that behavior?’”

Cultural hackers. What’s the best way to get people on board? No, let’s tweak that. What does one do in any situation to get a fast response with a minimum of effort? You hack it. To change mindsets, CIOs need to become cultural hackers, Graham Waller, research vice president at Gartner, suggested in a separate session. There are four rules for the culture hack, according to Mr. Waller. There must be an emotional connection. Hacks also need to trigger immediate results. They need to be highly visible, too. And lastly, they must be low-effort. Mr. Waller provided an example. To create a more collaborative culture , a CIO in the oil and gas industry asked direct reports at meetings to share a key problem they didn’t have an answer for. Cue discussion.

CYBERSECURITY

Facebook finds hack was done by spammers, not foreign state. Facebook Inc. believes that the hackers who gained access to the private information of 30 million of its users are a group of Facebook and Instagram spammers that present themselves as a digital marketing company. Their activities were previously known to Facebook’s security team, says the Journal's Robert McMillan and Deepa Seetharaman. The hackers gained access to the accounts by exploiting a vulnerability in Facebook’s “view as” feature, which lets people see how their profiles appear to others. Three obscure bugs in Facebook’s code allowed the outsiders to steal the data.

Meanwhile. Several public funds with holdings in Facebook are backing a shareholder proposal to push out Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg as chairman of the social-media giant’s board of directors, according to Ms. Seetharaman. But the announcement has no practical effect. Mr. Zuckerberg has a lock on the bulk of Facebook’s supervoting shares, each of which gives him 10 times the votes of average shareholders.

New cyberdefenses planned for connected devices. The connected “things” inside factories, homes and cities aren’t generally protected with antivirus software and users often aren’t asked to update logins and passwords, a reality that hackers happily exploit. According to Symantec, attacks on internet-connected devices were up 600% last year from 2016. Into this maelstrom of cyber activity comes a new partnership between U.K.-based Arm, the chip-design technology company that SoftBank bought for $32 billion in 2016, and Boston-based cybersecurity firm Cybereason, the WSJ's Timothy W. Martin reports.

The partnership. Cybereason said it will provide cybersecurity tools that use big-data algorithms to canvass all the devices on a network in real time for suspicious behavior. Arm, whose chips are in nearly all smartphones, will offer services to manage internet-connected devices and their data.

MORE TECH NEWS

Morgan Stanley banker’s side gig could help firm land coveted role on Uber IPO. Michael Grimes, Morgan Stanley’s top technology banker, has moonlighted for years as a driver for the ride-hailing service, the WSJ's Maureen Farrell and Liz Hoffman report. That side hustle may help the firm win the underwriter role on the most hotly anticipated stock-market debut in years.

Meet Mr. Side Hustle. Nearly a year ahead of Snap Inc.’s IPO, he rented an apartment blocks from the Snapchat parent’s Venice, Calif., office. When Morgan Stanley pitched music-streaming service Pandora Media Inc. on going public, Mr. Grimes had his bankers wear T-shirts from their favorite rock concerts.

Uber targets trucking with new trailer-rental business. The San Francisco company is set to announce a new division called Powerloop that will connect small- and medium-sized carriers with fully filled trailers, according to the WSJ's Greg Bensinger. The company, which has leased hundreds of trailers and is renting them to carriers for $25 a day, says the technology behind its core app translates well to the shipping industry.

Khashoggi affair raises doubts on second Vision Fund. The FT reports that Softbank’s chief operating officer said that the company is “anxiously looking at what is happening” in Saudi Arabia following the disappearance of journalist Jamal Khashoggi. The initial $92 billion Vision Fund, dreamed up by CEO Masayoshi Son, helps fund multibillion-dollar investments in hot startups. Saudi Arabia's Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman has pledged $45 billion of Saudi money to the fund.

Baidu joins AI ethics group. Baidu Inc. became the first Chinese AI firm to join Partnership on AI, an organization devoted to developing ethical guidelines for artificial intelligence research, Reuters reports. Other members include Apple Inc., Alphabet Inc. and Facebook.

Human fact-checkers play supporting role at Facebook. Following the 2016 presidential election, Facebook touted partnerships with outside fact-checking organizations to combat fake news. The WSJ's Georgia Wells and Lukas I. Alpert check in on the efforts in the run up to the November mid-terms and find that AI, not people, handle the majority of efforts. The company says that people just can't move fast enough.

Quote. “It’s like bringing a spoon to clear out a pig farm,” said P.W. Singer, co-author of the book “LikeWar: The Weaponization of Social Media” and senior fellow at New America, a nonpartisan policy think tank in Washington, D.C. “Facebook is never going to be able to hire enough people, and the artificial intelligence is never going to be able to do all of this on its own.”

France has a cloud company. It's called OVH and to better compete with the likes of Amazon Web Services, the privately held company plans to invest between $4.6 billion to $8.1 billion in its operations, Reuters reports. OVH currently runs 27 data centers in 19 countries, Reuters says.

Rwanda to host pit-to-refinery blockchain for tantalum. The government hopes to fight off allegations that the products of its mines are being blended with minerals from Democratic Republic of Congo, where conflict is rife, Reuters reports. Tantalum is used in smartphones.

You want 20% for handing me a muffin? An increasing number of bakeries, coffee shops, food trucks and other businesses now use tablet credit-card readers such as Square Inc. The devices often ask customers to make tipping decisions on the fly. “It guilts you into it,” Thom Kenney, a patron at Squeeze Juice Company in Boston, tells the WSJ's Jennifer Levitz. “It absolutely does, because they are standing there. You want to make them happy.”

The former president of USA Gymnastics was arrested on evidence-tampering charges stemming from a Texas investigation into sexual-abuse allegations and other misconduct at the women’s gymnastics team’s training camp. (WSJ)